


The Dead-Eyes of Damnatio Memoriae

by starsmora



Category: Black Panther (2018), Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Canonical Character Death, Destruction, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Family Loss, Fantasy, Gamora (Marvel) Dies, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Loss, Memory Loss, Other, Pain, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Psychological Torture, Soul Stone (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 21:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsmora/pseuds/starsmora
Summary: Damnatio memoriae-the condemnation of memories.Everyone pays a price, even unwilling sacrifices. She starts off with her memories but it is her curse now: to be a part of the stone is to lose who you are in more ways than one.





	The Dead-Eyes of Damnatio Memoriae

**Author's Note:**

> hello all. well this is a test run on something pretty painful that I'm developing. Gamora starts off this little fic thing with her memories and that changes by the end of it. All characters that were tagged in this fic are ones that will probably be revisited in it should I choose to go forward with exploring this storyline. I hope you all enjoy it? it's not as painful as it could have been. Depending on how this takes I might add another chapter.

_This isn't love._

_No, no, no._

At this point she's pretty sure that she's dead; the jagged outcroppings of rock that had blocked her fall certainly made sure of that. She could feel the bulk of a stone pressing along the back of her head and felt warmth pooling out beneath her hair. Cognitively each of the senses within her body began to power down along with the circuits working rigorously beneath her skin. Every breath Gamora took with languishing effort and deep down she knew it was time. It shouldn't be her time, not yet, but that didn't matter anymore. The facts were that she was the one laying at the bottom of Vormir. She was the one feeling her wounds pulsating into the dusty earth. Each breath drawn felt alike to inhaling shards of glass that relentlessly ripped through her body. The pain was unfathomable; so much so that when she finally seized breathing in her last few seconds of consciousness she was grateful. 

_I'm sorry, little one._

_The universe needs correction. I'M the only one who knows that...or at least I'm the only one with the will to act on it._

Floating back into consciousness wasn't a comfortable sensation for her. When Gamora awakens she finds that she is sprawled out flat on her back in a place that feels far too chilly. One might assume the surroundings were essentially lifeless...except that they weren't. Scrubbing at her eyes that felt sticky with a sandy substance in the shadows she noticed other bodies and movement. The sensors behind her eyes worked tirelessly to bring everything into focus. Staggering to her feet, she stumbles over towards a Kree woman holding the tiny hands of two children. "Hello?" Gamora's ears rang with the echo of her own voice. Wherever she was she decidedly hated it and took a more direct approach, reaching out to grab the woman's shoulder...only for her hand to pass straight through it.

Panic knotted itself into the pit of her stomach. Desperately she swiped her hand out again and again but each time it yielded the same result: her hand would pass right through the woman's body as though she effectively didn't exist. Pulling her hands away sharply to look at them she begins to tremble. So she was dead. She had to be...but what was she now? A ghost? A lost soul? The cavern she was standing in opened up to a wider landscape that was dark with the exception of the dyed orange skies.

Stepping out of the cavern Gamora took note of what seemed to be hundreds of bodies all massed and tangled together. Each was individually distinct from the next and stood in a straight line that parted when she came forward. The line of bodies re-closed itself as quickly as it had opened. Beyond the line of bodies were many other beings floating around or walking, some even talking and laughing with each other. Families.

She wondered if somewhere out in the vast dreary landscape she would stumble across her mother and father. The likelihood of that actually happening seemed slim to none but the thought brought her comfort. Loosely snatching at a few strands of hair her fingers began moving in intricate patterns to recreate a small braid of her childhood. Even in death she did not lose where she had come from.

The good news was that Nebula wasn't here so her adoptive father, or as she liked to think of him, her "kidnapper" must have kept his word. If it came down to it Gamora knew she would make the same choices over and over again to keep her sister safe. She hadn't done it right a lot of the time; being an older sister to Nebula. If protecting her sister meant trading her life to protect her...well, she was okay with that to an extent. It didn't stop her from missing Peter though or the other Guardians for that matter. They didn't even know she was dead. How many stones did Thanos have now? Too many to be stopped. All she could do was desperately hope that none of her friends became casualties in the crossfire. Gamora knew enough to know that the snap chose it's victims at random.

Not too far away from where she was standing there was a little human girl sitting in a dark grassy field with a fluffy creature by her side. It looked like one of the animals that the Collector kept on Knowhere before everything was destroyed: it had four little stubby legs, a big wet nose, a tiny tail and fluffy ears. It was what Terrans called a "dog" from the words she heard the little girl whispering. It was so strange. She could see and hear everyone but nobody even knew she was standing in front of them. The little girl's fingers laced behind the dog's ears to give it a few gentle scratches. "Puppy, when do you think Mommy and Daddy will visit?" Hearing the way the little girl spoke broke Gamora's heart. She walked over towards her and even reached out to her despite knowing that her hand would just pass through the skin. She stayed there and watched the girl sitting and petting her dog before sitting down herself to look out at the broad orange sky.

This would decidedly be her "new" normal now. There was nobody for her to talk to so she found that she talked to herself a lot more, whether it was just inner monologues or speaking out loud. "I can't have been dead for that long. Maybe if I'm lucky it's been only a few hours, possibly less. He was still missing two stones when we were on Vormir..." Her mind kept tracing back to the final two stones: the time stone and the mind stone, both of which were somewhere out there in the cosmos. "I wonder what's going to happen to all the people that die in the snap. Where will they go? Will they come here?"

It made sense to her that the dead or the dying would end up at the gatekeepers here much the same way that she did. "Is this supposed to be a safe place or a hell?" The question hung in the air loosely and she knew nobody else would be able to answer it. It confused her a lot; on the one hand many of the individuals here seemed happy and almost content...on the other it made no sense that she wasn't also experiencing those emotions. "Does anyone here even know anyone else's name?" It could be possible that they were all just a faction of lost and forgotten souls. "Can anyone here remember anything about their lives?" She noticed the way that a lot of the souls referred to each other and it seemed to be by species rather than name: "dog", "cat", "human", "Kree", "Xandarian"...the list went on.

"Do I remember who I am?" The words fell off of her lips without her realizing it. She knew who she was. "My name is Gamora. I have a sister and her name is Nebula. We worked and served our adoptive father Thanos as some of the most wanted criminals in the galaxy. I have a sword called the Godslayer. In the past four years I betrayed my adoptive father when I found my new friends the Guardians of the Galaxy and more specifically, Peter Quill, who led me to one of the infinity stones." Gamora wasn't sure why she was recounting all of this aloud; maybe a part of her was afraid to forget where she came from and who came into her life along the way.

It was a strange place wherever she had ended up but she assumed it was a place for the souls of the departed. In other words it was known as "soul world" where the line of individuals at the front admitted the recently dead. "They probably have a gatekeeper set up because of people trying to cheat the soul stone. That stonekeeper did say it was a soul for a soul. My soul for...the stone. It's my soul that's powering it." Her skin shuddered with the realization that washed over her: whether she wanted to or not, she was going to end up helping the only being she despised most with the destruction of the universe as they knew it. It didn't matter that she was dead. So long as her soul existed within the stone it would retain its power. "I'm so sorry..." Lowering her head Gamora closed her eyes and let out a defeated sigh. "All of these people are going to die...and it doesn't matter if I wanted to play a part in it or not. Even in death he's still deciding things for me." Air hissed through her teeth as she let out a low growl of aggravation. Would nothing lead to her true escape from Thanos?

The one good thing about this place was it didn't take anything away from her. She could sit on a rocky slope with her legs dangling over a shallow pool and recall the time that Drax told her a story about how he used to bring his daughter down to the Forgotten Lakes of his home world. He told that to Mantis too but sitting in this other-world Gamora had to wonder just how much everyone in it was remembered by those still alive. Maybe that was it. Maybe if they ended up here they became forgotten in real time...that was another thing. Time. It worked in funny ways here. The sky was always orange and it never changed. The air was always dusty and there were no stars. No sun or moon either. No sense of when a day began or it ended; everything was stagnant as was time. There was no time.

"Can you get sick if you're here?" These things she had to wonder about; and more importantly, she had to figure out a way to get out of here. The temperature sensors in her body were entirely out of alignment which begged the question of becoming ill. Her skin was rather warm to the touch and little beads of sweat began forming on it. "What's happening to me?" She whispered, turning her hands over and feeling the temperature increasing in small increments at a time. The muscles beneath her skin twitched and contorted a little in uncomfortable cramps. "I thought pain wouldn't find me here. This is supposed to be a place of rest, is it not?" She muttered to herself, curling in a bit as she doubled over from the intensity of the pain hollowing out in her stomach.

Only the cramps didn't wear off like they should have and only seemed to worsen. Her hair was now plastered to the sides of her forehead that was dripping with sweat as her stomach rippled with waves of agony. "Make it stop..." She whimpered, clawing at her skin and letting out an irritated grunt. "I'll do whatever you want just...just please make it stop." Her words were falling on deaf ears; the pain further increased to the point where she was using her palms to drag herself forward through the grassy, dry fields. Each time she hauled in a lungful of air a ricocheting pain raced through her sides. "Please..."

The temperature was now starting to get into her head. Her brain felt like it was melting and being ravaged apart from the insides. A gasp of agony yanked its way out of her throat as she collapsed into the dry grass coughing and spluttering. The heat was still increasing in her brain and the only way she knew that for certain was that the circuits behind her eyes and the sensors in her temples were starting to burn the skin. She was screaming now as she caught the scent of burning acrid flesh and a film of memories played behind her eyes. Times when she was younger with her mother and father, when she would go picking flowers with them and have the braid those into her hair, sitting for hours at a time...when she first learned how to paint...the times she celebrated holidays with her people...when she won her first fight while she was with Thanos...all of the memories blurred together into a kaleidoscope of blurred lines and colors.

The event itself felt like it lasted forever when in reality it had only been a few minutes, but by the time the pain started to ebb her mind felt entirely numb. The circuits inside of her brain seemed as though they were fried. Loud gasps followed by harsh coughing bouts tore through her. The searing pain inside of her skull had finally started to fade. It was right over the same spot that had connected with a rock when she first died on Vormir. Reaching one hand up to run her fingers through her hair she noticed a knotted braid in it. "How did this get here? I don't...what is that? Is it...what?" She kept tugging at the pieces of hair until they fell loose to spool over her shoulders.

"How did that happen? Did I roll around in my sleep?" Her mind was desperately clinging onto the edge of something; some distant far off memory or some thought or idea...whatever it was, she cast it aside. "I don't braid my hair. I never did." Sitting up again in the grass, she blinked slowly before thinking about her life. "When I was younger, I...I...I don't know what I did." She frowned as the memories wouldn't dredge themselves up. "I was younger at some point. I did some stuff, I guess. Family stuff. I know that my father is Thanos. I'm his daughter. I was his favorite daughter. His favorite daughter..." Her vision became unfocused as her mind's eye focused on that word: _favorite_.

 "I am Gamora. I'm the daughter of Thanos. I have a sister named Nebula...and I have a team of friends called the Guardians of the Galaxy." Her voice sounded far off, almost echo-like and dreamy. In front of her a little girl appears that has her hair braided with green skin and she approaches, nodding slowly and touching Gamora's hand. "You look like me." She said to the little girl, a ghostly, almost haunted look seeping into her facial expression. "You look just like me..." She smiled a little at the young girl who simply nodded before migrating away from her, carrying the first few years' of Gamora's memories with her. She didn't even know she had been looking at a younger version of herself that Thanos had conjured up.

"I'm not sure what it is that I'm doing here. I'm supposed to be out there helping my friends. How do I get out of here? I need to get off of this planet..." She whispered to herself as she gazed around dazed and confused. "What...is that sound?" There was something clawing at the back of her mind for entrance and try as she might to cast it aside it wouldn't budge.

_Steve?_

She could see him in her mind: a man with a metal arm, reaching out to someone before disappearing. It was like he never even existed...and then it dawned upon her in her hazy, hypnotic state of mind: he did it. He finally did it...only the voices wouldn't stop coming now. They kept popping up iin her mind, and she could feel the circuits beginning to overheat in her skull.

_Something's happening..._

_Oh man..._

_I am Groot..._

Gamora started grabbing at her now matted, tousled hair and bit back a scream. It felt like her brain was exploding with new pieces of information that wasn't meant for her: her mind felt empty, or a part of it did, like an open channel for all of these people and creatures disappearing and dying...like a vessel of some sort. Somewhere inside of her she recognized that Peter died but that was when she also felt confusion: who was Peter? Who were these people? She didn't know any of them...all she knew was that she was the daughter of Thanos.

_This is no place to die..._

_Tony...there was no other way..._

_Mr. Stark...I don't feel so good...I don't...I don't wanna go..._

She now had fistfuls of hair in her hands as her eyes squeezed shut tightly, trying to block out the voices that threatened to flood out her brain and any semblance of who she was. Her hands were shaking with the effort of holding back a cry as her body started crumpling back to sink down into the grassy field. 

_Quill?_

Sprawled out on the grass and gritting her teeth against the pain of what felt like a thousand sharp objects digging through her body, she found herself asking only one question and growling furiously into the dead grass.

Who the hell was Quill?

 


End file.
